A project aiming to provide flexible floating city spaces in wet slums has won the 2012 Architecture & Sea Level Rise award.
The floating urban structures are called City Apps and can plug gaps in a city's infrastructure by offering mobile spaces for food, shelter, sanitation and other necessities.
The Apps are the work of Koen Olthuis and his Waterstudio team, who specialize in the field of building living and recreational spaces on water.
[partner id="wireduk"] The award-winning project focused on the problems faced by wet slums — poorer areas of a city located near water and with a high population density and reduced access to things like public services and healthcare. With these specific problems in mind, Waterfront came up with a specific set of leasable Apps responding to the need for food, sanitation, shelter and energy.
"Slum communities are here to stay, and aiding these communities by upgrading living standards will fortify the cultures associated with these areas, unmatched by any other communities in the world," explains the Waterfront website. "Slum communities will benefit greatly from City Apps, and Waterstudio is set on paving the way for more aid to get to more people."
The Apps will be put into practice for the first time in Korail Wet Slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh using the prize money from the Architecture & Sea Level Rise award.
